The 'Black Velvet Punks' span from punk to jazz

[TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG] I'm emotionless yeah, there's nothing but skies. Feel it in my soul, nothing left in my eyes. Can you really tell me? I'm trying to hide.

Don't you want to shut up? You're trying to hide, to hide. Baby, there's nothing about love.

INTERVIEWER: That is Taylor Ngiri Seaberg, who has been playing music since they were about four years old, growing up as a military kid in a lot of different places. But at this point, they are rooted in the Minneapolis music scene. After the death of George Floyd and the uprising that followed, they organized a concert fundraiser and later an album, which was released in 2021.

The gender nonbinary, third-generation Kenyan-American multi-instrumentalist, photographer, videographer, community organizer, and playwright has worked with many local artists, including performer and writer Joe Davis. And Taylor now leads the band, Black Velvet Punks, mixing punk and hip hop with jazz and soul. Oh, I'm so excited that Taylor is on the line. Taylor, happy Juneteenth.

Taylor, are you with me? I am really hoping that Taylor Ngiri Seaberg will be on the line here shortly. And we obviously are having some problems here, some technical problems.

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Hello.

INTERVIEWER: Hi, Taylor.

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Sorry about that. I muted my phone.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, that's OK. That's all right. It's all right. I'm glad you're with us. Happy Juneteenth.

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Yes, happy Juneteenth. You gave a really nice intro. Thank you very much for that.

INTERVIEWER: You're welcome. You're welcome. Hey, I hear you recently moved back to Minneapolis from Chicago. What brought you back?

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: I did. So I've been living there for three years. And I did a lot of really amazing work with the Chicago music scene. But I wanted to come back because I have a five-year anniversary fundraiser for my company, Minnesota Youth Collective. We're on the ops manager.

And I also am a part of this two-week artist residency at Public Functionary at the end of July. So I wanted to kind be closer to my roots and closer to back home.

INTERVIEWER: You have got a lot going on. Oh, my gosh. I want to talk about your music. And then I'm going to talk about some of your other work. You have a new single out called Mystic, Should You Recycle Poison. We're going to play a little bit of that song right now and then talk about it.

[TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG, "MYSTIC, SHOULD YOU RECYCLE POISON?]

OK, walk me through the process of creating this song.

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Yeah, so this song was created. I mean, I was listening to a lot of Willow Smith's Coping Mechanism, which is-- she made this amazing new record that is probably her most punk, most metal record. And when I was in high school, I actually listened to Jada Pinkett Smith in Wicked Wisdom, which was her mom's band.

So it's kind of cool to see that she's taking after her mom in terms of being a Black woman doing rock music, which is kind of against the grain of what we're told. As Black people, rock music was for everybody else, for the Ramones, for Elvis Presley. But really, we were rooted in it. We created it. Black people did.

And so I had this song called Mystic that kind of had a lot of the stylings of grunge rock that I was listening to with Willow Smith but also just kind of things that I had kind of grown up with in high school. And the song was very much just kind of a portrayal of how I had gotten kind of screwed over and exploited by this nonprofit that I worked for. So when I was devising the lyrics, I was really using it cathartically to talk about this company.

Because I had tried to start a union at a job. And they had fired me because of it. So the song kind of birthed from that experience.

INTERVIEWER: I love the fact that you mix punk, soul, hip hop, jazz. I mean, it's pretty powerful stuff. What is your relationship to music and the different genres? How did that evolve for you as a kid?

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Oh, yeah. So my mom listened to everything under the sun. She was a classical pianist. She went to Juilliard. So my mom is an incredibly, incredibly talented musician.

She was also a choir director in church. And I was in and out of church. I was a church kid. My mom bribed me with a new guitar by saying, if you play in the church, I'll buy you a guitar.

So yeah, so I learned a lot of church songs. I learned a lot of gospel Baptist songs. I learned a lot of Lutheran Christian songs. And yeah, I think, from there, that's how I started getting into playing bass, and guitar, and keys.

And because I grew up in a very musical family-- and my older brother also is a multi-instrumentalist. He's an amazing guitarist. And he played the clarinet when we were in an orchestra. So I kind of had a very strong musical influence just because you were kind of the black sheep in the family if you didn't play.

INTERVIEWER: Got it. I'm going to continue to talk a little bit about music. But I want to switch focus and talk about your photography. Because your images of the uprising following the murder of George Floyd caught the attention of a whole lot of people. And you got a number of grants because of that.

You're not a trained news photojournalist. But I'm telling you, you have an eye. And the very best photojournalists I've worked with, they have this intuition for knowing where the story is and where a story is about to emerge moments before they focus their camera. You clearly have that ability. Where did you find that?

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: That's a good question. Yeah, I'm not a trained photojournalist. I've definitely taken a lot of influence from photojournalists, like Patience Zalanga. She's a really amazing Nigerian photographer in Minneapolis. And I really learned a lot from her.

Because similarly, she was just this amazing African photographer who started shooting protests all around the cities, including Jamar Clark's occupation. And I just loved the fact that you could see-- a picture tells a thousand words. You could see how people were feeling and the tensions kind of in the air just through her pictures. So I kind of took a lot of inspiration from that.

But also, I think, ever since I was a kid, I remember being in Naples, in Pompeii when I was eight years old. And my mom gave me this little dinky Polaroid Kodak camera. And I took pictures of the statues of the people. Because Mount Vesuvius erupted. The people were encased in molten lava.

And I was eight years old. And I remember seeing this and being like, this is a beautiful and kind of melancholic story to tell of these people just being encased. And that was how they had passed away.

And so-- I don't know. Ever since I was a kid, I've just looked at images like that, and looked at movements, or maybe even just-- I see things as scenes in my head, too. So I might see two young Black men talking it out, laughing. And I might think, that's a scene. That right there is something that's like a scene in a play or a scene in a movie-- and how to capture that and how to show that to an audience, quote, unquote.

INTERVIEWER: Say, when we have artists on the show, I love to hear what other music has been inspiring them. And you brought us a song by Minneapolis-based producer MMYYKK. It's called The Midst of Things. We're going to hear it.

[MMYYKK, "THE MIDST OF THINGS"]

Rolling round in misery, chest on fire, familiar sting. Smoke and light in the mezzanine, hold it down in the midst of things. All have sinned and fallen.

INTERVIEWER: What do you hear in this song that you love?

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Oh, so much. First of all, I've been a fan of Michael's music for years. I mean, he used to play in Astralblak, which was formerly Zuluzuluu, Which included Taylor Johnson and Greg Grease. Greg Grease is also on the artist residency that I'm a part of at the end of July. And this group of Black men just were creating cool, AfroFunk, futuristic tunes.

But MMYYKK has always been my favorite because his use of analog synths is so characteristically him. The thing about analog synths is they're not a digital electronic synths where it's like there's a patch, and you can sound like 20 other people. His characterization is how he does percussion, how he does frequencies, how he does delay that's so characteristic to how he's programming his analog synths.

And he has kind of telltale trademark of how he sounded. And also, just the fact that this song is-- he wrote it also at the start of the pandemic around the start of the uprising and so forth. It's also a lot of Black empowerment and a lot of Black reflection-- is in this piece, as well.

INTERVIEWER: Taylor, I'm running out of time. Oh, my gosh, I could talk to you forever. I know you're going to be playing this afternoon at the Soul of the South Side Juneteenth Festival in Minneapolis, 4:00. I wish you well. Thank you for being on the program.

TAYLOR NGIRI SEABERG: Thank you for having me.

INTERVIEWER: Take care of yourself. Taylor Ngiri Seaberg's been with us. Thank you for listening to Minnesota Now here on MPR News.